SendGrid Reviews

Pros

Easily integrates with a lot of other email marketing software, quite easy to set up, improves email deliverability.

Cons

The menu could be more straightforward.

It also has a bug that the support team says they know about but don't fix for some reason, even though it seems to me like it's very easy to fix: when you're approaching your sending threshold for one day, SendGrid sends you alert messages saying that you've used up over 95% of your 'MONTHLY' sending limit even though it's only 'DAILY' sending limit. When it first happened to me, I got very confused and contacted the support that they told me they know about it. All that's needed is to change one word. Don't get confused as I did.

Pros

It's really easy to integrate quickly with just one API key. When I learned that it is also preferred by many large businesses, my confidence increased considerably.

Cons

It's really easy to integrate quickly with just one API key. When I learned that it is also preferred by many large businesses, my confidence increased considerably.

Alternatives Considered

Mailchimp

Switched From

Mailchimp

Pros

The integrations that exist makes it easy to get started with and saves you alot of time.

Cons

We have had issues that our users are not receiving the verification emails. This have at some times killed the conversion of trials.

Alternatives Considered

Mailchimp

Pros

It was very easy to integrate with my existing stack. SendGrid has really worked hard to make sure it's easy to use their software with other services out there. Most website builders by default ask you to integrate Sendgrid as your emailing service, and that was the case with my website builder. It was really easy for me to get started as all I had to do was add an API key in a provided input field. SendGrid did all the heavy lifting and I did not have to do any coding or even go through the API documentation(which by the way is very comprehensive ). You fill that that is the case in so many services that integrate with SendGrid, integration is light-work.

Cons

It is a little expensive, especially when sending a tonne of emails out and having a lot of contacts. Your email totals low-key add up when you have multiple drip campaigns and transactional emails set up. If you have a small budget it's really difficult to get measurable success on SendGrid as I found out when I just started while having a very low budget. The best way to get the best out of SendGrid is with a substantial budget, and that's a bummer when starting out.

Alternatives Considered

Mailchimp and AWeber

Reasons for Switching to SendGrid

I choose Sendgrid because it was really easy to set up with my stack of Bubble and Zapier without any code of using the API documentation.

Pros

It's been over 2 years of using Sendgrid for many things within the marketing team. The code editor allows for effective e-mail marketing campaigns. SendGrid has tons of useful e-mail templates.

Cons

SendGrid doesn't have an intuitive GUI to edit like MailChimp. To make a custom e-mail marketing campaign you must know how to code.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub, Bronto Marketing Platform, GetResponse and Mailchimp

Reasons for Choosing SendGrid

Cost and ease of use.

Switched From

GetResponse and Mailchimp

Reasons for Switching to SendGrid

Budgetary limitations

Pros

The ability to track the status of each email at a granular level is helpful.

Cons

I would like it to be more intuitive to use.

Pros

The most striking feature for us is its easy integration with our NodeJS systems. The API is very versatile and allows us to do everything we need for our work.

Cons

Recently acquired by Twilio, Sendgrid is not a new tool and this is reflected in some aspects such as the control panel, which requires some effort for initial configuration and can be improved. But other than that, it works perfectly.

Pros

The templating of response emails are easy to set up and implement with a given API.

Cons

Maybe a little better on instructions on how to implement dynamic field.

Pros

Ease of integration into your authentication package

Cons

Some of the instructions across different platforms are confusing.

Pros

I liked the intuitive interface and the email builder. I often would use custom HTML templates but utilized the email builder as well.

Cons

Email deliverability and reporting/analytics

Pros

Our help desk/support team skews more to the "client's industry specialist" side and less to the tech savant end. That being said, SendGrid continues to be simple to use tool for those that interact with it daily. Setup and further customizations have been simple, and over the course of 10 years, it has continued to prove its value with minimum service inturruptions.

Cons

Our team's only major complaint during our ensure using SendGrid was mostly when it was a less mature product. There were some shortcomings early on with the email marketing and contact management, but there has been considerable progress and improvements in almost all corners of their service and UI.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub and Mailchimp Transactional Email

Reasons for Switching to SendGrid

Our company was VERY small and short staffed when we realized we needed a transactional/API email service. After reading reviews and comparing pricing and features, SendGrid fit our needs the best, especially the pricing packages.

Pros

What I like most about Sendgrid is that most of the tools out there offer easy integration with Sendgrid. Some apps can even directly integrate with SendGrid without using automation software like Zapier.

Cons

Sendgrid's UI is a bit confusing and it took some time to get used to the options. The email editor lacks certain features.

Alternatives Considered

ConvertKit, Moosend and Omnisend

Reasons for Choosing SendGrid

They are very expensive and for half the price I can get all the features on Sendgrid.

Switched From

Sendlane

Reasons for Switching to SendGrid

Sendgrid offers more options and subscribers on the free plan than what they offer on their paid plan.

Pros

ok this is not a free software but you can get all you want: just smtp or stats and more.. what I really enjoyed was the stats service.. If you run an e-commerce you'll be familiar with the question: "did my customer got the email?" well with sendgrid you can actually answer that question. You'll have a full report and you can easily tell if your customer got the email or something went wrong. This is something just invaluable.

Cons

This is not a pricy software but you need to understand its value. if your business is not big enough maybe it will be hard to sustain. nevertheless i just can say this is the place to look even if you have a small business. unless you want to take the burden of handling smtp this software is just awesome.

Alternatives Considered

MailUp, Zoho Mail and Mailchimp

Reasons for Choosing SendGrid

This is the best software if you need an affordable secure smtp with stats and cherries on top.

Switched From

Zoho Mail and Mailchimp

Reasons for Switching to SendGrid

SendGrid is my recommended choice. I'll keep suggesting it to all my customers.

Pros

The best thing about using the SendGrid Email API was the performance measured in terms of email deliverability and server uptime.

The dashboard provides good insights with respect to number of emails sent, delivered and opened. Thus helps a great deal in improving marketing campaigns.

From the deployment point of view, the integration of SendGrid with the existing email service was quite easy and can be completed easily without great efforts.

Cons

As far as technical aspects are concerned, there is nothing which I don't like.

On the pricing front, would like to add my views. Currently, the pricing plans are available as Free (100 emails per day), Essentials and Pro. The Essentials plan starts from 14.95$ per month for upto 40,000 emails a month and the Pro starts at 89.95$ per month. These plans are good for small and medium size websites.

Would be good to see if a new Basic plan is introduced for a low starting price of 4.95$ per month and offering upto 10,000 emails a month. Such a plan would be highly suitable for extra small website applications who have a limited customer base.

Alternatives Considered

Sendinblue

Reasons for Switching to SendGrid

Going by various product reviews and comparing the various plans offered by different vendors, we decided to select SendGrid as the best choice for our email requirements.

Pros

The code editor and how everything is optimized for coding allows for truly beautiful e-mail marketing campaigns. SendGrid can accommodate beautiful e-mail templates that were created in HTML/CSS, you just have to know how to code for it to be useful for you.

Cons

They do not have a way to graphically edit particularly easily like with MailChimp.

To make a good looking e-mail marketing campaign you must know how to code, there are not a lot of templates provided for you to edit or drag and drop. It was not intended as a tool if you would like to drag and drop.

On the upside this got us to learn how to code better.

Alternatives Considered

Mailchimp

Reasons for Choosing SendGrid

MailChimp actually gets very pricey after you exceed 2,000 users. MailChimp also lacks the sophistication you need when you start doing more advanced activities companies like Uber and Spotify do. If you see sent by MailChimp you know it's a small business.

Switched From

Mailchimp

Reasons for Switching to SendGrid

SendGrid is professional strength e-mail marketing.

Pros

1. Have AB Testing enable.
2. Manage unsubscribe emails.
3. Easy to Integrate via API or SMTP.
4. Email Reputation indicator.
5.Full detailed report. You can see if the email it's blocked, bounced or delivered.
6. Have a Forever Free plan . (40.000 Emails in the trial period, then 100 Emails Daily forever)

Cons

Send grid interface it's a little bit confuse.

No more cons to highlight, for me it's a perfect tool.

Alternatives Considered

Mailchimp Transactional Email, Sendinblue and Mailjet

Reasons for Switching to SendGrid

His API have a good documentation and it's easy to implement. The free forever plan . The Price it's low in comparison with the competitors.

Pros

We use sendgrid for our enterprise application for all purpose ranging from notification, verification and transactional information. We switched from a competitor that was burning our pockets and had a lot of issues. the pricing was a balance between our budger and our requirements and send grid just fit into the grid for us

Cons

No complaints. However the suggestion to the manufacturers would be to improvise the documentation for this product to provide more use case specific guidance to help users

Pros

Our business application uses Sendgrid for various purposes, including notification, authentication, and transactional data. We migrated from a competitor that was draining our bank accounts and causing a slew of problems. The cost was a good match for our budget and objectives, and the send grid was a perfect fit for us. They provide some handy online manuals to get you started, as well as a variety of configurable options to make sure the device is suitable for you.

Cons

It requires greater adaptability and customization tools to be successful in the long run. I couldn't discover a method to adjust automatic track in UTMs; it can only be activated or deactivated, which isn't convenient. The integrating and installation procedure were the most challenging aspects of implementing Sendgrid for us. However, customer assistance and YouTube tutorials were beneficial.

Pros

1. On the bottom left side of the dashboard is a small reputation percentage bar, that measures your reputation. The bar is updated daily based on your email sends, your reputation goes down if your email bounces or is marked as spam.
2. Stats: SendGrid provides A LOT of data on the performance of your email campaigns, these stats are: Requests, Delivered, Opens, Unique Opens, Clicks, Unique Clicks, Unsubscribes, Spam Reports, Bounces, Blocks, Bounce Drops, Spam Report Drops, Unsubscribe Drops and Invalid Emails. SendGrid also provides stats such as: Global Stats, Category Stats, Category Comparison, Subuser Stats, Subuser Comparison, Geographical, Email Clients & Devices, Mailbox Provider Stats, Mailbox Provider Comparison, Browser Stats, and Browser Comparison
3. A/B Testing
4. Unsubscribe Groups: This is without doubt my favorite feature from SendGrid. When you click on "Marketing" on the left side of your dashboard, and select tour from the drop down, it sort of lists steps to set up for sending marketing emails. Step 3 on the list of things to do is to create unsubscribe groups. Here you can Create groups that represent types of email that you regularly send to your recipients. If a recipient chooses to unsubscribe, they will have the option of selecting which of these groups they want to unsubscribe from.

Cons

1. The Email templates in SendGrids gallery are a bit basic which initially wasn't a problem as I liked creating my own template, but I did not like how I couldn't modify the "columns" module to my taste.

I wanted to create a template with three columns with the center column bigger than the two on the side. The idea was to have my client's images linking to their projects (On their websites) on the side columns, with the write up in the center column.
However, that couldn't be done (At least so far it seems so as I can't find any option to tweak the size/width of each column) as each column has an equal width.

2. No automation function: I'd like to create a sort of If/Then sequence where I can resend an email to a group of people after x days, for example, I'd like to resend an email (With a different heading of course) to people who have not opened the first email after four days.

Pros

We use SendGrid for transactional emails, such as welcome messages & notifications. Generally, SendGrid offers great tools to integrate emails into a variety of different application platforms and programming languages. We really like its level of detail when checking on the status of emails. Sendgrid is also free for basic transactional emails, which makes it easy to try and ensure it will work with your application. We use a third-party library called Nodemailer with Sendgrid, so switching from a different service to Sendgrid was trivial.

Cons

While the service is easy to use and offers comprehensive email activity metrics, there are a few things about it we didn't like. First, because the free tier uses shared IPs, we consistently had emails that wouldn't get delivered because of IP blocks. There were a handful of IPs that we had that experience with, and it persisted for weeks -- without any support intervention. Sendgrid must have deliverability metrics on their side as well, so I am surprised they didn't drop these IPs from their IP pool proactively. We had to upgrade to the PRO plan, which was the least expensive plan that had a dedicated IP. We also had to pay extra for 30 days of email history, you get 3 days by default. I'd love to see all these options be a-la-carte, but I get that you need to make revenue somehow, and few companies send enough emails to justify jumping to the next paid plan -- unless you NEED that deliverability guarantee that you get w/ dedicated IPs, which we did.

Pros

It did work and it did send the email newsletters that we needed it to. Therefore, it wasn't a complete waste of money :D Compared to many other options for email marketing, SendGrid was one of the cheapest options (except for sending the newsletters manually through one's email) and that was one of the reasons why we went with it.

Cons

It's got a lot of features, but they feel half-baked (I'm sorry, but they do.) For example, you can unsubscribe those whose emails have bounced or who unsubscribed. But in order to do that, you need to download those lists, then upload them to a special list you can call "unsubscribes" or whatever, and then, right after you've imported this list, you delete it - along with associated accounts. THIS deletes the people who bounced from your lists. Seriously?!

The annoying thing was the styling within the newsletter. I am a perfectionist, so all text sizes and everything should be consistent. However, SendGrid kept changing the styles of my text and I had to choose "Normal" several times (even after copy-pasting the text from Notepad that doesn't support formatting AT ALL). And if you click on "Edit HTML" (which I often do because it's a fast way to clean away all the annoying tags), SendGrid would convert my block to HTML and would have an entirely different set of styles for it.

Also, the support pages were written for someone who is native to this SendGrid thing and not a newbie. Despite doing email marketing for years, I had a hard time understanding what I need to do.

Alternatives Considered

Reply and Mailchimp

Pros

Sendgrid is ready for your scale. From the smallest Saas apps to the largest enterprises, Sendgrid was built with scale in mind. It handles transactional emails very well, and is relatively simple to integrate into your codebase or product workflow. Templates come out of the box, but some coding knowledge is needed to style transactional emails. All templates can be easily versioned.

Concerns on security and blacklisting are limited. As long as you follow their recommendations, Sendgrid will deliver your email.

Pricing is very fair and generous. In years of use, I've never gone over a plan limit.

Cons

Functionality can be limited in interesting ways depending on your plan. On the most basic paid plans, several code features are just missing. Reporting is the most glaring issue, with basic reporting showing only a rolling group of recently sent emails. Without a deeper dive into your logs, you may miss issues.

Transactional emails also lack some features that seem required, like weblinks for email and easy native unsubscribe. There are workarounds for both, but not without challenges. Version tracking for templates is also completely missing, unless you use new versions for each edit you make.

Pros

The pricing is great. Easy to use API with lots of documentations. Their user interface is straightforward. The customer service has always been pretty quick to get back to me. It's a popular service with a lot of integrations available.

Cons

I was a happy user of Sendgrid for a long time, but emails sent with the service always went to the spam folder for Microsoft email services (Outlook, Hotmail, MSN). This could never seem to get resolved, even with a dedicated IP that they offered. Then recently, Microsoft started blocking the emails. I found out this was because a spammer had used their service and got the shared IP blacklisted. They were unable to help me resolve it swiftly, so I had to leave the service, because we have a lot of people who use Microsoft email services.

Alternatives Considered

Postmark and Mailgun

Pros

Sendgrid have a full published API allowing for easy integration into any system you build. They have some super helpful guides online to get started and a whole host of customisable settings to ensure the product works for you.

Cons

The 30 day reporting period is quite limited and I wish this was closer to 90 days or longer.

Alternatives Considered

Mailgun

Reasons for Switching to SendGrid

Sendgrid have a stack of other features including SMS messages and contact management. For us, it felt like the better long term partnership.

Pros

The easy integration with their API and out of box integration with dozens of third parties. Easy to use SMTP gateway service and amazing free to start plan.

Cons

Office365 now blocks most of Sendgrids IP ranges which makes delivery difficult in some cases. You can how ever upgrade to a dedicated IP and this isn't an issue with their software. Other than that, have more than 1 api user on the entry plan would be great but what can I complain about..

Alternatives Considered

Mailchimp Transactional Email

Reasons for Switching to SendGrid

Pricing.